Serena Williams and Her Distractions

“I’m like a fly on the wall,” a member of the four-person camera crew following Serena Williams around the U.S. Open said yesterday. He was waiting for Williams to leave the locker room, just as he had been waiting for her to leave the court, and would soon be waiting for her to leave Interview Room No. 1 after her post-match press conference. Most players don’t have a film crew buzzing loudly behind their every move, and the crew, making a documentary about Serena and her sister, seemed to know they were a loud presence. “Actually, more like a bumblebee,” the cameraman said.

Do off-court distractions matter for Williams? There have certainly been plenty of them—her fashion line, the visits to the Kardashian wedding on weekend when she could have been playing a tournament, whatever is happening with her sister Venus—but none seem to faze her. Ana Ivanovic, Williams’s latest victim, has suffered from a more immediate distraction. The service toss is the only upper body motion in tennis that doesn’t involve the racket, and it is one that Ivanovic, once ranked No. 1 in the world, had completed well over a hundred thousand times by the point, two years ago, when she simply forgot how to toss the ball. Ivanovic would begin her serve twice, three times, or more, before finally swinging through with her racket. Yesterday, with the Ashe Stadium winds at their most swift and incomprehensible, her toss flew farther afield than usual. The crowd cringed. Athletes must deal with distractions of all kinds, but the self-imposed ones no doubt bear down more concretely on their minds. “I know, I know,” Ivanovic said after the match. “I do have problems with that.”

Williams won the match in just over an hour—so it seemed the camera crew hadn’t bothered her. Results are hard to question even when Serena admits that trophies, at least in their most physical sense, are no longer her primary concern. “I don’t have any more space,” she said in her post-match press conference, wearing a sliced-up neon yellow shirt that appeared to have been recently removed from a cage of rabid cats. “I mean, I have a new house in L.A. I created a karaoke room, so I can’t put trophies in there. The other area, the gentlemen’s lounge, is kinda packed with vintage things I got at a flea market, which is really cool…. I would love to keep winning them. But, we’re like, Oh, what are we going to do with this one?”

We all feed the distractions, of course. Among the questions asked in her press conference: “How well do you know Spike Lee?” (“We’re really good friends.”). Her favorite karaoke choice, we made sure to learn, is Rihanna. Did I mention that she won?